The acclaimed author was gassed at Auschwitz at 39 years old. She also wrote novels that were rife with anti-Semitic slurs and stereotypes. Diane Cole reviews “The Némirovsky Question” by Susan Rubin Suleiman.

Williamina Fleming, who had originally been hired by the head of the Harvard Observatory as a maid, devised a classification system of 10,000 stars. Laura J. Snyder reviews “The Glass Universe” by Dava Sobel.

‘The Undoing Project,’ focuses on the lifelong collaboration of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two Israeli-American psychologists who are our age’s apostles of doubt about human reason. William Easterly reviews.

The octopus is curious, adaptable, playful, mischievous, friendly and expressive—just like us. Peter Godfrey-Smith’s book, “Other Minds,” explores the brilliance of these creatures and the deep origins of consciousness.

When Capone faced difficulties, he whined about a ‘rigged’ system. Half the country thought he was a champion of the common man. Bryan Burrough reviews “Capone: His Life, Legacy, and Legend” by Deirdre Bair.

A Czech legionnaire who had fought the Bolsheviks in Siberia remembered slicing ‘their necks as if they were baby geese.’ Brendan Simms reviews “The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End” by Robert Gerwarth.

Stewart was brought up like the man-child in Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Kim.’ His father was a D-Day veteran whose greatest insult was ‘boring.’ Andrew Lownie reviews “The Marches: A Borderland Journey Between England and Scotland” by Rory Stewart.

Rapid change creates discomfort and provokes backlash—witness Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. What can we do to cope? Laura Vanderkam reviews “Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations” by Thomas L. Friedman.

‘What is this nonsense about admitting women to Princeton? A good old-fashioned whore-house would be considerably more efficient.’ Leonore Tiefer reviews “Keep the Damned Women Out” by Nancy Weiss Malkiel.

We are living in the Anthropocene: an era when human beings have changed the planet in ways that will be obvious in the geological record. Matt Ridley reviews “The Unnatural World: The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth’s Newest Age” by David Biello.

Joan Kroc gave $225 million to National Public Radio at her death even though she hadn’t been a devoted listener or regular donor. Marc Levinson reviews “Ray & Joan: The Man Who Made the McDonald’s Fortune and the Woman Who Gave It All Away” by Lisa Napoli.

While the idea of a caliphate is used and twisted by Islamists for sinister and brutal ends, the concept is not in itself threatening or dangerous. Ebrahim Moosa reviews “Caliphate: The History of an Idea” by Hugh Kennedy.

The battle over microaggressions going on at our universities is both a symptom and a cause of malaise and strife in society at large. Daniel Shuchman reviews “What’s Happened to the University?” by Frank Furedi.

One of the most eminent historians of the Nazi war of extermination shares his struggles to understand how it determined his own life. Michael S. Roth reviews “When Memory Comes” and “Where Memory Leads.”

Venezuela imports two-thirds of its sugar. The shortage of toilet paper is blithely reported as a sign that people are eating more. Roger Lowenstein reviews "Crude Nation: How Oil Riches Ruined Venezuela” by Raúl Gallegos.

When Sherman’s army marched across Georgia to Savannah, Meigs was waiting at the coast with a complete refit for all the troops. Allen Guelzo reviews “The Quartermaster: Montgomery C. Meigs, Lincoln’s General, Master Builder of the Union Army” by Robert O’Harrow Jr.

In 2012, veteran counterterrorist officials concluded that the White House was suppressing intelligence on Islamic extremist threats to justify pulling out of the Middle East. Mark Moyar reviews “Twilight Warriors” by James Kitfield.

It was said of Dylan that he didn’t need a Nobel, that he is yet another old white guy, that he is arrogant, that he composes songs not poems. David Lehman reviews “The Lyrics: 1961-2012” by Bob Dylan.

Is Cody Wilson peddling ‘open source terrorism’ by publishing designs for a
3D-printed gun? Or is he a free-speech hero? Ronald Bailey reviews “Come and Take It: The Gun Printer’s Guide to Thinking Free” by Cody Wilson.

So what if Burt Bacharach was a narcissist? What was that failing next to his bright blue eyes, salt-and-pepper hair and sexy voice? Joanne Kaufman reviews “They’re Playing Our Song” by Carole Bayer Sager.

Early Zionists had an arch distrust of traditions and hierarchy. Their emphasis on self-reliance shaped an ethos that remains alive and well. Neil Rogachevsky reviews “Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn” by Daniel Gordis.

Roderick John Macrae murders a constable—and the man’s son and daughter. He tells his grisly tale in the shadow of the hangman’s noose. Tom Nolan reviews “His Bloody Project,” a novel by Graeme Macrae Burnet.

The hard work and enterprise of China’s people—not Communist Party policies—have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Howard W. French reviews “The Perfect Dictatorship” by Stein Ringen.

People ‘hire’ companies to do a job. That’s why the names of some of the most successful ones—such as Google and Xerox—become verbs. Philip Delves Broughton reviews “Competing Against Luck” by Clayton M. Christensen et al.

The Nobel for economics, first given in 1969, has been instrumental in recognizing and popularizing the work of laissez-faire economists. Edward Glaeser reviews “The Nobel Factor” by Avner Offer and Gabriel Söderberg.

In a former Pennsylvania steel town, a football team remains the single source of pride. It’s a microcosm for a whole region of America. David M. Shribman reviews “Playing Through the Whistle: Steel, Football, and an American Town” by S.L. Price.

To ‘win’ Japan to our side in the Cold War, we offered the most generous occupation—aid, reduced reparations and guaranteed security. Richard Bernstein reviews “Powerplay: The Origins of the American Alliance System in Asia” by Victor D. Cha.

Putin was against hosting the Olympics until his minions, egged on by contract-driven oligarchs, organized a PR campaign for one “customer.” Karen Dawisha reviews “All the Kremlin’s Men: Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin” by Mikhail Zygar.

The transformation of well over 100,000 human beings from legal property into armed agents of the government remains the single most revolutionary episode in American history. Matthew Karp reviews “Thunder at the Gates” by Douglas R. Egerton.

Was Toussaint Louverture a prefiguration of black power, a “Black Spartacus,” a nationalist visionary, a covert agent of slavery or a reactionary lackey of white masters? Felipe Fernández-Armesto reviews Philippe Girard’s new biography.

Stéphane Mallarmé’s 20-page work pointed the way toward “Demoiselles d’Avignon” and Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.” Micah Mattix reviews “One Toss of the Dice: The Incredible Story of How a Poem Made Us Modern” by R. Howard Bloch.

The England we visit in this sophisticated compilation for children has no afternoon tea or jolly rounds of cricket, but blood, superstition and magic. Meghan Cox Gurdon reviews “The Book of English Folk Tales” and four other new children.

Vladimir Mayakovsky, who roared his poems in literary salons, was terrified of his mortality. In Robert Littell’s new novel about the bare-knuckle poet, “The Mayakovsky Tapes,” four of his lovers say that sex staved off his fears.

November 26

“Moonglow” is an ancestor’s tale transmuted into a bewitching work of Greatest Generation mythology. The novel is a celebration not only of one character’s remarkable life but of the country where it was possible.

To defeat Japan, the U.S. turned the Navy into a technologically advanced seaborne civilization. Richard Snow reviews “The Fleet at Flood Tide: America at Total War in the Pacific, 1944-1945” by James D. Hornfischer.

In 1901, Buffalo was a thriving, spirited metropolis of 370,000, bursting with civic pride. Margaret Creighton’s “The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City” explains how the city and the exposition it hosted became the victims of wretched luck.

He was illiterate, filthy, a fraud, a money-grubber, a traitor, a warmonger, a demonic miracle-worker. None of these claims were wholly true; most were wholly invented. Edward Lucas on Douglas Smith’s definitive biography.

Amity Shlaes reviews two new books about the former president and argues that the New Deal was simply a more intense, less constitutional version of Hoover’s policies—and both failed to yield recovery.

How a year spent living alone in a shack on the Nauset dunes inspired Rachel Carson and helped create the Cape Cod National Seashore. Gerard Helferich reviews “Orion on the Dunes: A Biography of Henry Beston” by Daniel G. Payne.

Without the urging of a radical journalist and politician, the painter never would have undertaken his most ambitious project. Maxwell Carter reviews “Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies” by Ross King.

Play depends on restrictions and limitations: the rules of a game and the boundaries of a field, but also the conventions of musical harmony or the form of a sonnet. Steven Poole reviews “Wonderland” by Steven Johnson; and “Play Anything” by Ian Bogost.

Seiji Ozawa is a beloved figure, known more for his modesty, preparation and smiling-hippie looks than for breaking batons. In “Absolutely on Music: Conversations With Seiji Ozawa” he talks about his craft with Haruki Murakami.

James can seem unapproachable, but he was, in fact, a raconteur and pleasure-seeker. He believed in laughter, friendship and kindness. And even as he rounded into plump old age, he embodied the young man’s eagerness for learning and improvement.

The uncanny inner world of the civil servant that gave us that gave us the 20th century’s most imperishable fables about disorientation, guilt and absurdity. Benjamin Balint on two books about Kafka by Reiner Stach.

November 12

The most important historical film ever made is 6 feet of 8mm film on a plastic reel shot by a 58-year-old dress manufacturer named Abraham Zapruder. Edward Kosner reviews “Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film” by Alexandra Zapruder.

The battle at Hampton Roads in 1862 ended a thousand-year tradition of wooden warships. Jonathan W. Jordan reviews “Iron Dawn: The Monitor, the Merrimack, and the Civil War Sea Battle That Changed History” by Richard Snow.

The more closely one examines the writer’s family history, the more it starts to resemble a tragedy in which the same events keep repeating like a compulsion or a curse. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst reviews “The Fall of the House of Wilde” by Emer O’Sullivan.